Social Media Newsfeed: Yahoo Growth | ‘Selfie’ Recognition

Yahoo Now Has 400M Monthly Mobile Users, Marissa Mayer Says(Business Insider)
When Mayer took on the CEO job at Yahoo, she knew it needed to up its game in mobile. She told the board: “I think the mobile wave, if we can catch and harness even part of it, can really propel us.” So she said on stage to Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff during the Dreamforce conference Tuesday night. PCWorld Yahoo now has about 400 million mobile monthly users, according to Mayer. Yahoo has grown its mobile development team to about 400 from between 30 to 60 in a year, and many of those personnel were internal transfers, she added. Since coming aboard, Mayer has been focused on Yahoo’s product design philosophy as well. The Next Web So does Mayer consider herself to be the chief design officer? She doesn’t think so and says that in her executive team, she has a spot for a senior vice president of design (similar to a Jony Ive role), but she loves design and enjoys working with teams to create the experience. She sees herself responsible for designing the organization, the brand and the overall vision — this is what she’s excited about. In a bit of drama, at the beginning of Mayer and Benioff’s talk, a small group of protesters began chanting, but were quickly escorted out. The protest appears to have been in response to Mayer’s position on Walmart’s board of directors. SFGate Mayer, however, did not talk about her announcement on Monday that Yahoo was encrypting all communications and other information flowing from the company’s data centers to protect its users’ online activities from the National Security Agency. Bloomberg In related news, Yahoo (YHOO) boosted its stock-buyback plan by $5 billion, returning more cash to shareholders as Mayer seeks to revive growth at the largest U.S. Internet portal. Yahoo will also sell $1 billion in convertible debt maturing in 2018 in a private placement, the company said yesterday in a statement.

‘Selfie’ is the Word of The Year (FishbowlNY)
Well, you’ve done it, Internet. The publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary have unanimously — unanimously — selected “selfie” as 2013′s word of the year. A selfie is a self portrait posted online or on a social network. Selfie beat out other terrible words for the honor, such as “twerk” and “bitcoin.” OxfordWords Here’s a video, featuring Richard Holden, online editor for Oxford Dictionaries, that reveals why this word was chosen, what the earliest known usage of selfie is, and which related terms have already been created. Mashable Now, let’s take a little trip back to the roots of the social-media era’s most loved (and loathed) mode of photographic self-expression. The hashtag #selfie has been used on Instagram 57 million times, the company said. The first photo tagged #selfie in the photo-sharing network’s short but illustrious history was uploaded on Jan. 16, 2011 by user Jennifer Lee.

Twitter Apps Get Search Filters and Trends Timeline(The Next Web)
On Tuesday Twitter updated its apps for Android and iOS with a slew of new features, focusing on search and discovery. New filters in search help users easily find the tweets and people they’re looking for. Twitter has also added a trending timeline. Under the “Discover” tab, you’ll see trends along with associated tweets, including trending TV shows and nearby events.

Snapchat Users Edging Past Facebook’s Photo-Upload Volume(Business Insider)
Snapchat users now send 400 million “snaps” — the term for photos and videos shared over the network — daily, according to a source at Snapchat. To put this number in perspective, sources at Facebook are still reporting that 350 million photos are uploaded daily worldwide on the network, and that Instagram users are uploading 55 million photos daily. Mashable Snapchat appears to be neck and neck with Facebook in one key metric: photos shared daily. Unlike Snapchat’s snaps stat, Facebook’s number doesn’t include videos.

You Can No Longer Receive DMs From Any Follower (AllTwitter)
In a move that’s typically Twitter, the company has removed the option for users to receive a direct message from any of their followers without needing to follow them back — just one month after enabling it. So those of you who actually noticed it in the past 30 or so days will have to go back to the old way of sending DMs — mutually following each other.

The Dropbox Computer Vision Acquisition That Slipped Under the Radar(GigaOM)
Dropbox has made some pretty smart (and frugal) acquisitions over the past couple years (including Monday’s acquisition of PiCloud) as it attempts to grow into a full-on platform, but its coolest might also be the one that very few people seem to have noticed: Anchovi Labs.

Facebook’s Feedback Panel Returns(AllFacebook)
Last month, we told you about Facebook’s new Feedback Panel and how its eerie data gathering could potentially save your marriage. This month, there’s another round of feedback panel questions to share — and more for us to subjectively interpret from the questions. Read on for the most telling question.

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